Professor fired for quoting from Mark Twain

[fishbrains]

The professor could had made her point using other words and avoided the whole thing. Don't be a martyr if you're an adjunct. No one will care.

No one in the university may care, but this has generated headlines and discussion here.  I imagine it will generate more.

When I taught "Barn Burning" I emailed my one African-American student ahead of time and asked her if the N-word would be a problem.  She politely said no and we proceeded.

We have posted elsewhere about this sort of hysterical censorship on college campuses

It's interesting how students find some works using "forbidden words" offensive and other works not-so-offensive. I've had students complain about the works of Twain, Louis Valdez, David Henry Hwang, and Countee Cullen, but not works by Faulkner, ZZ Packer, or even Amiri Baraka, etc. But caustic satire like Twain's tends to be such a turn-off for younger students (I even finally dropped "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"). In fact, when students say they are "offended," they have quite often just missed the satire within the work. But it's hard to tell students they are offended because they don't read well.

Then again, I've also dropped "A Modest Proposal" to avoid reading any more essays about how we shouldn't eat babies. So it goes. For that matter, I'll never try to teach Vonnegut again. I'm fortunate I teach mostly intro courses where I can adjust the readings, as opposed to something like "Post-Civil War 19th Century American Novels" where skipping past Twain would be a distinct omission.

This is depressing.

[dr_codex]

The professor could had made her point using other words and avoided the whole thing. Don't be a martyr if you're an adjunct. No one will care.

No one in the university may care, but this has generated headlines and discussion here.  I imagine it will generate more.

When I taught "Barn Burning" I emailed my one African-American student ahead of time and asked her if the N-word would be a problem.  She politely said no and we proceeded.

We have posted elsewhere about this sort of hysterical censorship on college campuses

It's interesting how students find some works using "forbidden words" offensive and other works not-so-offensive. I've had students complain about the works of Twain, Louis Valdez, David Henry Hwang, and Countee Cullen, but not works by Faulkner, ZZ Packer, or even Amiri Baraka, etc. But caustic satire like Twain's tends to be such a turn-off for younger students (I even finally dropped "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"). In fact, when students say they are "offended," they have quite often just missed the satire within the work. But it's hard to tell students they are offended because they don't read well.

Then again, I've also dropped "A Modest Proposal" to avoid reading any more essays about how we shouldn't eat babies. So it goes. For that matter, I'll never try to teach Vonnegut again. I'm fortunate I teach mostly intro courses where I can adjust the readings, as opposed to something like "Post-Civil War 19th Century American Novels" where skipping past Twain would be a distinct omission.

This is depressing.

Censorship arguments often assume that readers, audiences, and viewers are pretty dim, mechanically reproducing whatever they are exposed to. See Fight Club, go out and start a fight club.

Of course, that's how a lot of people did respond to Fight Club, at least in its film adaptation. The satire went right on by.

Topical satire is even harder, especially for older texts, since you often have to have a solid grasp of the context to get the jokes and the critique. Just today I was looking at a text that one of my graduate students dug up, from very early in 1642. It's obviously political, but it's not at all clear what causes it supports. So, the EEBO record just puts "Satire?" in its notes section, and moves on.

I agree; it's depressing.

[Wahoo Redux]

"I don't play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, 'Don't go near colleges. They're so PC. They just want to use these words: 'That's racist;' 'That's sexist;' 'That's prejudice,'" he continued. "They don't know what the hell they're talking about."

When Jerry Seinfeld avoids your demographic something has gone awry.